A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

I was initially put off of Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent work of pop sociology by a review that said that he explained the better math scores of Asian countries as compared to European ones by saying that working in rice paddies makes you good at math. Now that I’ve read it, I still don’t buy his rice paddy theory, but the theory itself isn’t quite as dumb and direct as the claim above. I’ll explain what it actually is as a snapshot of the value and drawbacks of the book: some plausible explanations, some poorly supported theories, some mind-blowing anecdotes and analysis, some goofy overreaching.

Gladwell’s theory is that working a rice paddy is more labor-intensive and responsive to individual experimentation than working a wheat field (interesting if true; he provides good evidence in favor of rice, but little against wheat), and that virtually the only factor separating kids and countries which do well at math with kids and countries which don’t is the amount of time and effort put into studying and doing math. The latter claim is very well-supported, especially by the hilariously telling 100% correlation of scores on an international math test with the percentage of questions completed on a long and dull survey handed out at the same time: the kids who are willing to plow through the survey are the kids who do well on the math test, and the kids who get bored and give up on the survey score poorly on the test.

Gladwell then attempts to link the work ethic necessary in rice farming to the work ethic passed down culturally long past the point when many people in the country are farming anything, so that rice farming is a sort of first cause for seeing things like a longer school year as valuable. I still think this is a stretch. But the chapter itself has all sorts of fascinating material— and the fact that my attention was held by math is a testament to Gladwell’s writing.

His thesis is that no one really pulls themselves up by their bootstraps, and that exceptional success depends on advantageous sociological factors and chance as much as it does on merit, and sometimes more. This is probably not a startling idea to anyone here, but some of his individual examples are genuinely eye-opening. I especially liked the first few chapters, on the disquieting intersection of early birthdays and talent tracking, and the crucial ten thousand hours of practice. There’s also a good section on how a number of factors (including the years of their birth and the unintended repurcussions of a particular brand of anti-Semitism!) gave some Jewish lawyers the chance to become legal superstars.

Recommended if you enjoy pop sociology and are willing to read some cultural and other generalizations that may make you tear your hair out.

My favorite works by Gladwell are his magazine articles, which tend to be more in-depth and less prone to sweeping conclusions than his books, and Blink, about the benefits and perils of snap judgments, which has some great material on subconscious prejudices and what can be done to overcome them. And is very entertaining.

Outliers: The Story of Success

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Articles: http://www.gladwell.com/archive.html